June 2015

June 30, 2015

Summer in New York City was welcomed back in a now treasured annual ritual, as the River to River festival returned downtown. In diverse locations – this year including the fabulous atrium of Federal Hall where Yanira Castro staged “Court/Garden,” to the sliver of alley that is Cannon’s Walk, behind a storefront at South Street Seaport, where Wally Cardona and associates hid away – the free dance, music, and visual art on display was diverse, often exhilarating. All the benefits and dangers of outdoor performance were also on display – blistering sunshine, mirrored surrounding waters, thundershowers – as well as the street and foot traffic that have long made each event idiosyncratic. In the most immediate way, the essence of performance is offered at R2R – each moment is unique. If you invest your time and attention, the rewards are abundant, under beautiful for spacious skies, in the light and shadow of Wall Street’s canyons.

June 28, 2015

If you ever wondered what kind of future it would be where robots are ubiquitous, Blanca Li’s “ROBOT” can suggest only one answer: a funny and entertaining one. From the theme-setting opening scene, where a single dancer, Gael Rougegrez, stood on a dark stage with projections of various human and robotic forms making him at times flesh and at times machine, the Spanish-born choreographer’s show with its eight dancers, seven NAO robots and Maywa Denki’s all-mechanical orchestra, presented a 90-minute illustration of the human-machine relationships and identity, with all their quirky, funny and complicated sides.

To plan a five day season of six performances in the same week that the Polish National Ballet came to town and Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance visited nearby Wolf Trap was ambitious. The artistic director of the Chamber group, Diane Coburn Bruning, scheduled three partly different programs. On the evening I attended, she chatted informally but informatively with the audience prior to curtain time. Hers is a part time project. It is activated when quite a few other performing companies are on summer layoff. She engages dance artists who are on leave from the likes of Washington Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet and Cincinnati Ballet. Chamber’s string quartet includes players from the Alexandria (VA) Symphony, the Fairfax (VA) Symphony, the US Marine Band and the Washington National Opera’s Orchestra. These musicians are part of the set for each dance and, like the lighting designs of Maja E. White, the playing can become a visually active complement to the choreography. To my eyes, concept seemed to be at the crux of several of the short dance works Coburn Bruning had choreographed or chosen for this bill (Program A). Her own “Time Has Come”, a longer work performed at the end of the evening by “the full company”, was more than an idea: it had body.

June 26, 2015

The Royal Ballet made a rare appearance in New York, opening their brief season with works by their two knights, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. They danced the same program in their 1976 visit, and since then "The Dream" has become familiar thanks to ABT's sparkling production, but the darker "Song of the Earth" is unfamiliar and probably, judging by its lukewarm reception, will remain so.

Modern Dance and Modern Art grew up together, and each divided into a myriad of separate streams. Choreo- grapher Zvi Gotheiner now takes three radically different artists of the 20th century, and tries to project the feeling of their works in dance; he scores on at least two out of three.

The ballet company from Warsaw’s big (wielki) theater that I remember had a rather different look than the one currently visiting America. No question but that Krzysztof Pastor, director since 2009, has changed its image. It used to have Soviet style during the long era when Poland was subservient to the USSR. The dancing then was highly articulated, light yet pliantly strong. Not as refined as the Kirov or polished as the Bolshoi, the Warsaw dancers’ technique was respectably Vaganova. I saw the group at home at the Teatr Wielki in Asaf Messerer’s “Coppelia” staging and in the Venusberg dances of Wagner’s opera “Tannhaeuser” (seemingly in the manners of Lavrovsky and Bejart) as well as on tour (at Wolf Trap) in “Giselle”. Now, the dancing is still balletic but earthier. Bodies have a lower center of gravity despite ultra-arched leaps by both women and men. Movement has a nicely old fashioned, Ballet Russe consistency, both in Pastor’s pair of academically based works and in the character dancing of Emanuel Gat’s “Rite”. No, this isn’t the dumbed down mixture of ballet and modern dance that Czech, Dutch and other European troupes deploy for balletomodern compromise choreography, but something a little different.

June 19, 2015

Rudolf Nureyev's production of "The Sleeping Beauty" has been a cornerstone of the National Ballet of Canada's repetoire since 1972. Then, and now, this lavish and epic production calls on the entire company to realize their potential and put their best foot forward. "The Sleeping Beauty" provides an abundance of opportunities for dancers of all ranks to test themselves in an enduring classic. However, this season's opening night performance was marred by unfortunate circumstances as a whopping 18 dancers were sidelined with injuries. While "The Sleeping Beauty" typically relies on a full complement of dancers, the show must go on, and miraculously it did. There were countless last minute casting changes and those who stepped on stage managed to carry a solid performance.

Finances being what they are, Lydia Johnson's small company danced to recorded music. Even so this ballet-based, contem- porary-inflected company is musically incisive and nuanced. Johnson's tastes are eclectic and this performance had music ranging from Bach and Mozart to modern jazz. Her company wears its ballet training lightly, with soft, rounded arms, controlled movements and unmannered, unexaggerated lower bodies. This program was less overtly dramatic than some I have seen (no real narratives going on) but the dancers moved through unusual geometric, off-center formations with shifting moods.

June 15, 2015

It is much too casually that we dismiss the Don from the ballet “Don Quixote”. This errant knight brings to the action hints of human nobility, of nature’s wonders and of a divine madness. Such aspects elevate this dance comedy in the ranks of works of art. No, I am not referring to the Balanchine/Nabokov version, although it made me see the traditional Petipa/Mikus ballet in a new light. Probably what choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Ludwig Minkus had in mind was the dance equivalent of a zarzuela. However, they did not believe that telling an entertaining story and punctuating it with bravura dancing necessarily excludes spirituality. Their Don is a divine fool whose behavior mentors the prosaic people he meets, endows magical beings such as the dryads with a wild sense of mystery and, ultimately, brings a sort of mad logic to himself.

Artists of the Royal Ballet in Carlos Acosta's production of "Don Quixote." Photo by Johan Persson.

June 14, 2015

Gina Gibney’s stark, bright re-creation of the performance space at the new Varis Center is the right canvas for the visual feast Anna Sperber offered in “Ruptured Horizon.” Each of her dancers, Alice MacDonald, Michael Ingle, Omagbitse Omagbemi, and Rebecca Warner brought a different type of body and movement to the choreography – from the extension of Omagbemi’s preternaturally long arms to Warner’s small, quick-moving torso. What ruptured the vast white horizon were the brilliantly plumed creatures that populated it.